We have Christ, Christ has us

9 But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His. 10 And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. 11 But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.

So, when the Spirit of God dwells in us we are not "in" the flesh any more, because he is now "in" us. The next part of the relationship is with Christ. I wonder why they call the Spirit "of God" in the first sentence and then "of Christ" in the second, and why they talk about it negatively, as in the ones who don't have it, rather than positively. I think that it is necessary to talking about how our relationship with God is mediated by Christ, as is explained in the next verse.

I want to make the idea of "having" very complicated and contrasted with "being" in the flesh, but I don't think that it is. I think the reason why Paul used "have" instead is to make the point more strong that if you don't have Christ, he doesn't have you. But otherwise it's parallel...if you have Christ, Christ is in you, in the person of his Spirit. It's still interesting to me that we are portrayed as the larger entity. It never says that we are in Christ or in the Spirit, but that they are in us. My idea of this goes back to my plant metaphor; it is important that the sap is in the branch, but you couldn't really say that the branch is in the sap. And if it's very important that you define how the plant as a whole relates to the branch, you could say that the branch belongs to the plant (and vice versa) because the plant's sap is in the branch.

One reason that occurs to me, why it avoids saying here that we are in Christ or in the Spirit, is that like I talked about before Paul really wants to make clear here that our relationship with the Spirit and the change that results from it are internal, and we are changed from the inside out. If he said that we were in the Spirit (which for all I know he does say, elsewhere) we could think that it was something that we could immerse ourselves in and he would infuse into us from the outside, through osmosis. But in this context it's important that the Spirit is in us, and the change is generated from the inside.